Even if he had given her up to Damien, she’d still love him. She couldn’t stop that.
Then there was the matter of what Damien seemed to have planned for her. It wasn’t to starve her out because she received food and some water in the form of a plastic bottle and a Power Bar every so often. They didn’t want to kill her in the cell. At first, she didn’t eat it, fearing there might be some kind of poison laced inside the food and water. But after a while, she was unable to stop herself from eating with the growls of her stomach and the severe pangs of pure, sharp pain radiating from her torso from the lack of food.
She didn’t die, so the next time they dropped off food, she ate it again. It became her pattern. She ate food and drank water and measured the days that way. She figured they were giving her two a day, one in the morning and one at night. It certainly wasn’t enough calories to sustain her long term and she was sure the next time she looked into a mirror, she would see something gaunt and unrecognizable staring back at her. If she ever got out of here, it would be very hard to explain where she’d been when she emerged looking exactly like the prisoner of war she seemed to be right now.
It wasn’t until several days in that someone finally returned to the cell and she realized how much she’d missed and craved human attention from someone, the ability to communicate with someone. It was a guard, someone she’d never seen before who looked angry and unfriendly, but she didn’t care. She just wanted to know that she wasn’t the last human left in the universe, even if her only other options were the ones imprisoning her and putting her in danger. She’d take it. Maybe that’s how people fell into Stockholm Syndrome. They wanted attention and contact so much that they’d take it even from the maniacs who imprisoned them.
He silently walked up to her and opened the gate with a loud creak of the metal. It swung open and he stared at her, stepping back and gesturing for her to step out. She, at first, thought this had to be some kind of trick or test. There was no way that they would let her walk out of the cell of her own accord. And even if they were, it wasn’t to anywhere good, she was sure. She didn’t know in what way but it was clearly a game, clearly some kind of trick.
“What’s going on?” she asked, hearing her own voice for the first time in so long. It was rough, scratchy, almost unrecognizable.
“You step out of that cell or I go in there and drag you out. Your call, lady,” he said back.
She wouldn’t get answers. Honestly, what did she expect anyway? She’d come this far with absolutely no one giving her anything to go off of, why should right now, the time when it seemed they would force her to walk to her death, be any different?
She stepped out, because what else could she do? She had no desire to fight this anymore. Their designs on keeping her locked away in that cell with barely any food and water to go on, with no one to talk to, had done its job. She was obedient, submissive. She was willing to do whatever they asked because she had no other desire or intention to live for, nothing to want for on her own. She had nothing she needed, she was no one. They’d broken her completely.
So, she stepped out of the cell and stopped where he told her to stop, and stood there, waiting for her next instructions. She walked down the hall where she was told to walk, turned when she was told to turn. She was nothing. She was their puppet, their slave, their ghost sliding through the halls. The lawyer to-be, the runner, the daughter, the girlfriend, the everything that Andrea had been before this moment was gone completely. She was over, there was nothing left of her to put up a fight. So she wouldn’t. She would prolong the existence she had left for as long as possible with obedience and silence and go from there.
#
They lead her to a room she hadn’t been in yet. That wasn’t a surprise. There were also people here she didn’t know, men and women she hadn’t seen before. They looked at her with the same unfamiliar and unkind expression everyone had given her thus far. They stood around a table. It was a meeting room. She didn’t see Diego. There was no friendly face. She wondered what all their animals were, how she would die.
“Welcome, Miss Andi.”
If she ever got the chance to dream again, that was a voice that would haunt her in her sleep. Damien stood there with such a coolness, like the cold and dark of the world itself came from him. She shivered thinking about what his dragon form must look like in its fullest. She imagined a demon with those all too human eyes. That’s what made evil so terrifying, of course. Evil was human at its core. You couldn’t be evil without eyes like Damien’s that had once belonged to a child, a son, a newborn baby that, somewhere along the way, had turned into something awful.
She didn’t say anything, though there was a pause that she was fairly certain she was meant to fill. She had nothing to say to him. What could she possibly say? Sentences wouldn’t form. She was a shell. It didn’t even occur to her to be sad, to cry, that Diego might be dead already. She would never see her mother again or her father. Her family would wonder for years and years what happened to her because she doubted her death, and the nature of it, would be made known to the world. Damien would make her disappear from the world.
“You will do a favor for us,” he said. “And then you will go free.”
The words just sort of bounced off her at first. She took that at face value. She would perform a service for Damien. Then he would set her free. Fair enough. He looked at her though with a cocked eyebrow and a frown.
“Didn’t you hear me, Andi?” he said. This time she couldn’t get out of speaking.
“Yes.”
“Doesn’t that excite you? I will let you go free,” he repeated.
He lingered on the word free with a measured hiss. He made the syllables stretch out and mean something. Free. He would let her go. She would do something for him and then she would walk away. She’d be able to shower, she’d be able to sleep in her own bed. She’d see her own apartment again and her parents. She’d be able to hug her mother and she’d never let her go. She’d apologize for every single time she’d said something inconsiderate or wrong.
She’d be out of this hellhole. This entire world she’d been forced to create in her mind, with her own imprisonment, it’d be gone. It would be a memory. And memories couldn’t hurt you, not really, not when they were over. Damien would linger, but she could escape him in the light of day.
“Yes,” she answered him finally, breathlessly. “It does.”
“Good,” he said. “Because you need to do your job correctly or you won’t be able to get anywhere, you understand? You follow our instructions to a T and you do your job and you get to leave. If you don’t, you come back here and it’s a lot less pleasant. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” he said. He walked around the table and toward Andrea, smelling sour, like a snake. He pointed to the screen that showed a park. “That’s where you will be going. It’s a nice place. Lots of people will be there, lots of eyes, and lots of cameras. That’s good for us. We want you to be seen by as many people as possible, understand? Everyone needs to see you.”
“Okay.” She’d go naked if she had to, if it meant she would get out of here.
“You will wear a special vest for us. Pretty easy, right?” Sure. Easy. Perfect. “And when the time comes, you will push a button… then the vest will explode.”
Oh.
Every single dream she had up until that moment crumbled. She watched the images of her mother’s face, the distant smell she could remember of her childhood living room at Christmas, then it was gone. It was stolen from her like a drowning man being dragged farther and farther below, watching the sun get dimmer and dimmer as the pressure around her increased. She wasn’t going free. They were letting her go because she would die.
“If you don’t press the button,” he said. “If you choose to run. We will blow it up for you. I will be a lot less happy, but you won’t have to worry about that too much.”
So that was that. This was how it ended, not wi
th starving, not with torture. They would use her to make their points. They would force her to publicly do something that would get a lot of people hurt. Would her mother watch the news and wonder where she went wrong? Why her daughter would do something so heinous and awful? She wanted nothing more than to let her mother know that she wasn’t doing this on purpose. She wasn’t doing it willingly. She didn’t want to hurt anyone.
“Where’s Diego?” she choked out. She needed to know there was at least one good thing in the world, that Diego was alive, that he could go on, go home to his family.
“He’s around,” Damien said and she wasn’t sure if she could trust his word play. “Would you like to see him?”
“Yes,” she nearly gasped, trying not to sound too desperate or terrified.
She needed to see Diego. She needed something. She needed to touch something familiar, soft, anything that might lead her home from the darkness she was trapped in. She nodded fervently and prayed it wasn’t a trick. She prayed he was alive, that she wouldn’t be shoved into a room with a body when they claimed that they would let her see him.
“Well then, since you’re helping us out so much, I can’t possibly deny you one last request while you’re our guest, can I?”
She didn’t say anything. She was out of words. She imagined a world where she ended up with Charles. The heartache and irritation would have been worth being allowed to live now. She desperately wished she had that foresight. But, at the same time, she couldn’t imagine a world where she didn’t know Diego. She was meant to, she needed to. She would live the rest of her life with a gaping hole if she hadn’t met him and she’d never know why. Of course, at least she’d be living.
#
They took to her to another cell, not unlike her own, but on the other side of the complex. They’d kept them as far away from each other as possible. She was led up to one and made to stand in front of it and wait. The guard unlocked the small gate and called at the person on the inside to wake up, that he had a visitor. She could see the outline of something inside the cell but she wasn’t exactly sure what she was looking at. Diego seemed to be lying down, maybe they’d broken him too.
But when he rose, she made out the outline of fur. She saw pointed ears that didn’t look human. He was in his wolf form. Suddenly, she rushed into the cell and looked at him closely. She reached out her hands to place them on his body and feel everything she could. He was large, larger than a normal-sized wolf. His fur with messy, almost dangerous looking in the way it stuck out in all directions like in spikes. She wondered if it was from the dungeon or if he always looked so rugged. She wouldn’t know. She’d never known him before now.
His eyes though. His eyes were exactly the same as she always remembered them. And that’s what pulled her in, pulled her back to the present. She held his head in her hands and he looked at her so tired and so sad that she wasn’t sure how she wouldn’t cry. She needed to be strong, for both of them.
“Hi,” she whispered. “You’re beautiful like this, you know.”
Diego didn’t respond; he just kept looking at her, watching with eyes that were far too human. She pressed her forehead against his, letting the warmth from his body touch her own. It would be the last time she ever saw him. She prayed and prayed he’d get to go home, at least one of them should be able to go free, to live life.
“I think I love you,” she said. “I know I do, actually. Even with everything. I’m just glad I got to see all of you. I don’t think we will see each other after this and I can’t tell you why. But just know that I’m always thinking about you and I’ll always have a part of you with me.
“I don’t know why you didn’t want to tell me. I don’t think I’ll ever quite understand that, but I want you to know that I forgive you. I’d never blame you for being exactly who you are and I think it just makes you that much more beautiful. I want you to never stop being that gorgeous man I know you are, whether you’re walking on two legs or four.”
She pulled back to look at him. His eyes were sharp and focused on her and he lunged forward to hook his furry head around her neck. It was a hug and a kiss in the best way he could. She held him as tightly as she possibly could before someone came in and dragged her away to her fate.
They’d call the bombing several things after that in the news and in debates in college classes. But she’d remember it as the worst day of her life and hoped that, one day, someone could make all of this right.
TEKKIN
(Flames of Freedom Series Book I)
C.J. Scarlett
***
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Chapter 1
“Reports are coming in now that an emergency session of Congress has been called in the wake of the July attack, better known by sympathizers as the Assault for Freedom—”
“This session of Congress is expected to address the moral issues presented in the Bill of Protection put forth by Republican senator, Nome Casey—”
“The bill is expected to pass in both the House and Senate with the Republican majority in strong favor of many facets, including the implementation of a registry for shifters, required medication, and many other precautionary measures—”
“None of this is about protection,” says the head of the DC Shifter Family chapter David Olsen. “It’s a about fear—”
Alessia had to turn it off, putting the television to sleep with a flick of a button. It clicked and she watched all the color pull into the center, darkening the screen around it like a reverse black hole. She heard the hum as it slowly shut itself off completely. She rose from the couch and walked into the kitchen. She felt a little ridiculous using student housing. She just passed her twenty-fifth birthday and still lived in a dorm, hanging onto the last year of her eligibility for her mother’s health insurance.
It was the way things were going. It was the plight of her generation; it had been such a joy to hear about it again and again in several culture classes during her undergrad. All sorts of statistics showed how no one seemed to leave home anymore and everyone born after date X were fucked and would starve to death by the time they were thirty. She was living it now, with her head buried in debt, in a crappy student apartment, listening to talking heads have nothing better to tell the world.
She didn’t condone the attacks. They’d killed four people, one of them had been a child. It was abhorrent.
“You still buying that shifter victim crap?” her father asked after the attack during one of his particularly drunk phone calls to her.
She ignored him and hung up. She’d lost too much time over the years explaining to him all the good shifters had done for society and how no one looked at white teenage boys from low-income families like a threat even though they were constantly shooting up schools. His skull was thick and filled with alcohol. There was no getting through to what was left of the brain, despite what her classes said about trying to educate the prejudiced.
She walked into the kitchen and poured out what was left from her stained, hand-me-down coffeemaker. She had to use a folded paper towel for a filter after she realized she’d been far too lazy to stop at the drugstore like she promised herself she would. Her mother claimed she could taste the difference when she had to do that back home. Alessia shrugged it off. Who cared? Filtered coffee was garbage anyway. She learned that during her semester in Austria when she had real European coffee and told herself she would never go back.
She never liked the first day of classes. It was always a bullshit, shortened hour of handing out a syllabus and explaining to a room full of adults to get their homework in and actually show up for class. She never dressed for it. What was the point of making a good first impression to a room she’d be spending only twenty minutes at most? That had always been her mentality during her undergraduate career.
But now she would be standing on the other side of the room.
As part of the practicum of her PhD program, she was required
to teach at least one class a semester to undergrads. She didn’t get a choice in the class, just handed an empty spot within the Shifter Studies and Culture major with whatever professor was willing to jeopardize his class by letting a teaching fellow behind the podium.
For her, it was Gender Roles in Shifter Culture with Professor Drake Tekkin. She’d taken the class herself in her sophomore year, under a different professor, at a different school. But it was a reprieve nonetheless. She considered it an easy first go at the practicum. Besides, she was a woman; that automatically got her points in any gender studies class.
She took a look in the mirror, fixing her skirt and flattening out a fold in her blouse. She tried to dress business casual but somehow always succeeded in looking like some kind of schoolboy librarian fantasy. It was the best she could do; at least it would get them to pay attention to her.
She slipped on a jacket, put her purse over her arm, and walked out the door.
#
She hadn’t expected the protests to start so early in the semester. But several groups were already outside, picketing both sides of the argument. They never seemed to direct their chants at each other, but she caught several glares and sneers directed across the neutral patch of grass that was the only barrier between them and World War III in the quad.
She walked through them, keeping her head down. She tried not to look swayed either way, like both batches of students skipping their first day of classes were an inconvenience to her. But she couldn’t stop the slight smile on her face at some of the pro-shifter signs outright calling the president a twat and filled with puns. It always seemed those who were on the right side of history in these situations were more clever with their protests. She walked on.
Other than the chants behind her, the chatter as a student took pictures and tweeted about the incident, the campus was gorgeous on this first day of classes. The grass shined a bright green under the sun and the blue of the sky was practically mesmerizing against the dark brick of the buildings. She was glad she chose a grad school in a warm climate. She’d done four years battling miserable winters in the Northeast and had no interest in doing it again. Here, even her worst days would be brightened—literally—by the gift of good weather. She often fell victim to seasonal depression.
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